Griswold named medical director of new refugee center

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM

“Survivors have their armor on. They want to protect you from knowing what has happened to them. You don’t want to strip off all the armor in one piece. They would fall apart. It’s a process. Providers have to learn how to work well with interpreters and to be culturally competent.”

Kim Griswold, associate professor

Department of Family Medicine

A UB physician and expert in refugee health has been named the
primary clinician and medical director of the Western New York
Center for Survivors of Refugee Trauma and Torture. The center is a
collaborative initiative conceived and funded by Jewish Family
Service of Buffalo and Erie County through a grant from the New
York State Health Foundation.

Kim Griswold, associate professor in the departments of Family
Medicine and Psychiatry in the School of Medicine and Biomedical
Sciences, will conduct forensic exams of refugees from all over the
world who are being resettled in Buffalo and Rochester.

Certified by Physicians for Human Rights, her work with the
center involves documenting and assessing evidence of torture and
trauma in refugees and asylum-seekers. She also is required to
provide testimony at asylum hearings.

“The UB Department of Family Medicine has been highly
visible in serving this region’s immigrant population,”
says Marlene Schillinger, president and chief executive officer of
Jewish Family Service of Buffalo and Erie County. “We are
mounting this critically needed project with the goal of
integrating physical and behavioral health care for refugees. Dr.
Griswold has unique qualifications to do this.”

Jewish Family Service is one of Buffalo’s four federally
certified refugee-resettlement agencies. In addition to UB Family
Medicine, partners in the recently launched project are Lake Shore
Behavioral Health, Journey’s End Refugee Services and Vive La
Casa, with Rochester Catholic Family Center as a regional
collaborator. Other UB partners on the project include the UB
Global Health Initiative in the School of Public Health and Health
Professions.

More than 90 percent of the state’s refugees settle in
upstate New York. An estimated 1,500 new refugees resettle in
Western New York annually from Sudan, Somalia, Burma, Iraq, Bhutan,
Nepal and other conflict-ridden countries.

“The more refugees coming from places experiencing major
conflicts, like Syria, the more there is a chance that they may
have suffered trauma and/or torture,” says Griswold.
“They have a trauma history that we, as their providers, need
to know about. They may have witnessed violence or been beaten or
raped, and we, as objective assessors for court testimony, need to
know how to do a sensitive inquiry. There are specific techniques
that we are trained to use, a process of inquiry and documentation
that allows us to identify trauma and torture.”

According to Griswold, broaching these subjects with victims
requires extraordinary care.

“Survivors have their armor on,” she says.
“They want to protect you from knowing what has happened to
them. You don’t want to strip off all the armor in one piece.
They would fall apart. It’s a process. Providers have to
learn how to work well with interpreters and to be culturally
competent.”

Griswold says the types of torture and trauma many resettled
refugees experience range from sexual violence to state-sponsored
violence in order to elicit information, or being forced to witness
violence against a family member.

“Sometimes it’s not torture per se, but extreme
trauma,” says Griswold. “They have seen horrible things
that don’t leave a physical mark, but leave an imprint
forever.”

The center will help create a coordinated network of care for
these populations.

“Now, if we have a referral for a specific refugee or
asylum-seeker, we’ll have a better network of providers who
can care for them,” Griswold explains. “Whether
it’s medical, social work or mental health counseling,
we’ll have a better fabric of providers who can seamlessly
care for this person.”

Pam Kefi, JFS Buffalo’s director of program development
and implementation, notes that from a human rights perspective,
“it’s important to help remove barriers to
self-sufficiency. We hope to improve people’s ability to live
independently well.”

In addition to providing care directly to Buffalo’s
refugee population, Griswold will conduct research on how well the
project is going in order to assess its success.

“The research aspect will show us where there are gaps in
service,” she explains. “It also will demonstrate how
this project can help us use resources more wisely. Treating people
who have been victims of torture and trauma will, in the end,
result in their becoming more successful, contributing members of
the community.”

Interprofessional education among UB’s health sciences
schools also will be impacted, as students will have opportunities
to become more familiar with issues in the refugee community. This
summer, two UB medical students will be working with Griswold to
help identify health and medical networks in Buffalo for this
population and to identify services that may be missing.

“From my perspective, refugees and asylees are incredibly
vulnerable populations,” says Kathleen Soltis, president of
the UB student chapter of Physicians for Human Rights and a
second-year medical student. “We don’t receive a lot of
education on them in the formal medical curriculum, but through our
clinical work with mentors in the community, we often come into
contact with them. It gives us the opportunity to learn about
different medical issues that refugees experience that you
don’t see in the rest of the community.”

Please leave blank

Comments

The UB Reporter welcomes comments from its readers. Please
submit your comments in the box below.